The Making of a Marchioness & Its Sequel, The Methods of Lady Walderhurst. Frances Hodgson Burnett
than Lady Agatha,” he remarked, after he had wished her “Good-morning.”
“She is oftener invited to the country than I am,” she answered. “When I have a country holiday, I want to spend every moment of it out of doors. And the mornings are so lovely. They are not like this in Mortimer Street.”
“Do you live in Mortimer Street?”
“Yes.”
“Do you like it?”
“I am very comfortable. I am fortunate in having a nice landlady. She and her daughter are very kind to me.”
The morning was indeed heavenly. The masses of flowers were drenched with dew, and the already hot sun was drawing fragrance from them and filling the warm air with it. The marquis, with hia monocle fixed, looked up into the cobalt-blue sky and among the trees, where a wood-dove or two cooed with musical softness.
“Yes,” he observed, with a glance which swept the scene, “it is different from Mortimer Street, I suppose. Are you fond of the country?”
“Oh, yes,” sighed Emily; “oh, yes!”
She was not a specially articulate person. She could not have conveyed in words all that her “Oh, yes!” really meant of simple love for and joy in rural sights and sounds and scents. But when she lifted her big kind hazel eyes to him, the earnestness of her emotion made them pathetic, as the unspeakableness of her pleasures often did.
Lord Walderhurst gazed at her through the monocle with an air he sometimes had of taking her measure without either unkindliness or particular interest.
“Is Lady Agatha fond of the country?” he inquired.
“She is fond of everything that is beautiful,” she replied. “Her nature is as lovely as her face, I think.”
“Is it?”
Emily walked a step or two away to a rose climbing up the gray-red wall, and began to clip off blossoms, which tumbled sweetly into her basket.
“She seems lovely in everything,” she said, “in disposition and manner and—everything. She never seems to disappoint one or make mistakes.”
“You are fond of her?”
“She has been so kind to me.”
“You often say people are kind to you.”
Emily paused and felt a trifle confused. Realising that she was not a clever person, and being a modest one, she began to wonder if she was given to a parrot-phrase which made her tiresome. She blushed up to her ears.
“People are kind,” she said hesitatingly. “I—you see, I have nothing to give, and I always seem to be receiving.”
“What luck!” remarked his lordship, calmly gazing at her.
He made her feel rather awkward, and she was at once relieved and sorry when he walked away to join another early riser who had come out upon the lawn. For some mysterious reason Emily Fox-Seton liked him. Perhaps his magnificence and the constant talk she had heard of him had warmed her imagination. He had never said anything particularly intelligent to her, but she felt as if he had. He was a rather silent man, but never looked stupid. He had made some good speeches in the House of Lords, not brilliant, but sound and of a dignified respectability. He had also written two pamphlets. Emily had an enormous respect for intellect, and frequently, it must be admitted, for the thing which passed for it. She was not exacting.
During her stay at Mallowe in the summer, Lady Maria always gave a village treat. She had given it for forty years, and it was a lively function. Several hundred wildly joyous village children were fed to repletion with exhilarating buns and cake, and tea in mugs, after which they ran races for prizes, and were entertained in various ways, with the aid of such of the house-party as were benevolently inclined to make themselves useful.
Everybody was not so inclined, though people always thought the thing amusing. Nobody objected to looking on, and some were agreeably stimulated by the general sense of festivity. But Emily Fox-Seton was found by Lady Maria to be invaluable on this occasion. It was so easy, without the least sense of ill-feeling, to give her all the drudgery to do. There was plenty of drudgery, though it did not present itself to Emily Fox-Seton in that light. She no more realised that she was giving Lady Maria a good deal for her money, so to speak, than she realised that her ladyship, though an amusing and delightful, was an absolutely selfish and inconsiderate old woman. So long as Emily Fox-Seton did not seem obviously tired, it would not have occurred to Lady Maria that she could be so; that, after all, her legs and arms were mere human flesh and blood, that her substantial feet were subject to the fatigue unending trudging to and fro induces. Her ladyship was simply delighted that the preparations went so well, that she could turn to Emily for service and always find her ready. Emily made lists and calculations, she worked out plans and made purchases. She interviewed the village matrons who made the cake and buns, and boiled the tea in bags in a copper; she found the women who could be engaged to assist in cutting cake and bread-and-butter and helping to serve it; she ordered the putting up of tents and forms and tables; the innumerable things to be remembered she called to mind.
“Really, Emily,” said Lady Maria, “I don’t know how I have done this thing for forty years without you. I must always have you at Mallowe for the treat.”
Emily was of the genial nature which rejoices upon even small occasions, and is invariably stimulated to pleasure by the festivities of others. The festal atmosphere was a delight to her. In her numberless errands to the village, the sight of the excitement in the faces of the children she passed on her way to this cottage and that filled her eyes with friendly glee and wreathed her face with smiles. When she went into the cottage where the cake was being baked, children hovered about in groups and nudged each other, giggling. They hung about, partly through thrilled interest, and partly because their joy made them eager to courtesy to her as she came out, the obeisance seeming to identify them even more closely with the coming treat. They grinned and beamed rosily, and Emily smiled at them and nodded, uplifted by a pleasure almost as infantile as their own. She was really enjoying herself so honestly that she did not realise how hard she worked during the days before the festivity. She was really ingenious, and invented a number of new methods of entertainment. It was she who, with the aid of a couple of gardeners, transformed the tents into bowers of green boughs and arranged the decorations of the tables and the park gates.
“What a lot of walking you do!” Lord Walderhurst said to her once, as she passed the group on the lawn. “Do you know how many hours you have been on your feet to-day?”
“I like it,” she answered, and, as she hurried by, she saw that he was sitting a shade nearer to Lady Agatha than she had ever seen him sit before, and that Agatha, under a large hat of white gauze frills, was looking like a seraph, so sweet and shining were her eyes, so flower-fair her face. She looked actually happy.
“Perhaps he has been saying things,” Emily thought. “How happy she will be! He has such a nice pair of eyes. He would make a woman very happy.” A faint sigh fluttered from her lips. She was beginning to be physically tired, and was not yet quite aware of it. If she had not been physically tired, she would not even vaguely have had, at this moment, recalled to her mind the fact that she was not of the women to whom “things” are said and to whom things happen.
“Emily Fox-Seton,” remarked Lady Maria, fanning herself, as it was frightfully hot, “has the most admirable effect on me. She makes me feel generous. I should like to present her with the smartest things from the wardrobes of all my relations.”
“Do you give her clothes?” asked Walderhurst.
“I haven’t any to spare. But I know they would be useful to her. The things she wears are touching; they are so well contrived, and produce such a decent effect with so little.”
Lord Walderhurst inserted his monocle and gazed after the straight, well-set-up back of the disappearing Miss Fox-Seton.
“I think,” said Lady Agatha, gently, “that she is really handsome.”
“So